How do you know when you’re being trolled?
Joseph Fiennes to play Michael Jackson in 9/11 road-trip drama
I can’t imagine what the challenge was.
The dance moves, obviously.
Obviously.
Merge this thread with the one where people are arguing if Steve Jobs can be played by a black guy, and let the heads explode. 
Well, if Bob Dylan can be portrayed by a woman…
Well, Michael Jackson *was *whiter than most white people…
I was actually about to start a thread about this very article. The premise sounds like something your S.O. might utter in a Nyquil-induced delirium.
Ossie Davis once played JFK, and his portrayal was brilliant.
Getting the nose right. :eek:
dl
No! That’s ignorant!
If he were still alive, MJ could play Bubba, and just think of the makeup savings!
Thanks to Ghostface Killah, I now know who can pull off the nose: Martin Shkreli.
Octavia Spencer will be a fabulous Elizabeth Taylor and Chow Yun Fat is already being touted as the definitive Brando.
It is a bizarre casting. It sounds like a fake story that The Onion or something would put up to make fun of whitewashed casting. A good show could be made of that roadtrip, but I don’t know why you would cast Joseph Fiennes.
But it’s not like Joseph Fiennes otherwise looks anything like Michael Jackson. Why would color shade be the main criteria for casting?
I would definitely want to see that. Or I saw Orlando Jones tweet that he’s okay with Fiennes being Jackson if Angela Bassett plays Elizabeth Taylor, which is another perfect casting to me.
Fiennes really needs to rethink this one. This could be for him what Mommie Dearest was for Faye Dunaway.
Truth in biography!
Seems that “race trading” pretty much nullifies the idea that “No reason why Person X can’t play Race Y”. If you believe that, why would you only be “okay” with it if it’s a 1:1 swap?
Did Mommie Dearest majorly hurt Dunaway’s career? I wasn’t aware of that, but that was a little before my time.
Anyway, this isn’t a movie, it’s apparently a one-off 30 minute British TV show. It’s possible it won’t even be shown in the US, although maybe Netflix or some smaller network might pick it up. If it was a movie, I could see it maybe being a bad thing for Fiennes, and him becoming a major symbol of whitewashed casting, but since it’s just a British TV special, it’s possible it’ll be mostly forgotten soon enough.
It’s not like there should be quotas for each TV show or movie, or even studio wide. There’s nothing specifically wrong with a movie or TV show that is casted with majority or all white actors. But the issue is when it keeps happening again and again. I do want more diversity in TV shows and movies, so if “race trading” like you say would do it, then yes I’d be okay with that. I’d prefer that to just having a lot of white characters in everything, and even the non-white characters played by white actors. I’m not outraged or anything that Fiennes was cast as Michael Jackson, it’s more like an eye roll.
True dat. Later day MJ wasn’t something that could really be accurately portrayed by anyone, regardless of race, without some major prosthetics and/or makeup work.
Well, Ralph Fiennes played Voldemort, a man with essentially no nose. Now his younger brother wants to try doing a similar thing.